Limited and defective auditory learning skills are widely reported in children with intellectual disabilities, and in particular in with children who also have autism. These problems impose limitations on a wide range of learning opportunities, including communication, social skills training, and academic instruction, opportunities that are so often the primary focus of intervention programs, such as those based on principles of applied behavior analysis (ABA). Past research from our group has focused on the development of effective auditory discrimination learning procedures to address the problem. Though often successful, these procedures are not universally so. This may be accounted for, in part, by converging evidence from language, speech perception and psychophysiological research suggesting that individuals with autism may be particularly prone to deficits in verbal